As Kentucky-based Sawyer, 58, points out: "I scarcely think Jesus could have overturned the tables of the money-lenders and driven them from the temple if he was a wimp. The model I use for my paintings is a surfer guy who's built like a brick shithouse.".....According to recent polls, the ratio of women to men worshippers in this country is 65% to 35% – and too much girliness is getting the blame for the gender imbalance.

Hence the rising number of conferences and sermons aimed at men that present a more muscular version of Jesus, along with the continuing success of Christian lad's mag Sorted.

A new "Jesus is a hawt!" aesthetic? Arguably, not so new insofar as in the 1400s and 1500s, Jesus was sometimes depicted, in part as an evocation of Christ as the New Adam, as a prototypical man, "The Man," as it were.

Ecce Homo,*Man of Sorrows (c. 1525) by Flemish artist Maerten van Heemskerck is one of several extant examples (this particular one is now at Bob Jones University, Greenville, South Carolina) of religious imagery in which Christ's virility and, perhaps, more symbolically his resurrection from death, is indicated, albeit in a literally shrouded manner.

Interestingly, some far earlier depictions of Christ depicted him in a more hermaphroditic manner, which is assumed by many art historians to be an indication of the theology of Christ's salvific actions' sufficiency for--and all his actions relevance to--all of humanity The best example of this is the mosaic above the Arian Baptistery in Ravenna, Italy.

Some of the earliest known depictions of Christ are in the mode of Hermes, who was also symbolized (before Christ was) as a "good shepard," as sage or philosopher in the Greek manner, and as Apollo the Sun God. Examples of all three types of those depictions exist on early Christian funerary art.